Totoro on Stage
Family & Animation

Totoro on Stage

By Helen McCarthy.

I’ve seen a Catbus live onstage not twenty feet away. I’ve watched Totoro fly over the heads of a packed audience, all gasping, laughing, cheering and entirely unprotected up in childlike visa of magic. I’ve seen the conventionally invisible puppeteers and their rods and strings and wind machines and skill and grace and delicacy. I’ve been transported by music I know by heart, translated and augmented for a new medium.  In 55 years of London theatre-going I have never left an auditorium tween a prod so united in laughter and the joy of life.

It’s a strange feeling, writing well-nigh My Neighbour Totoro, to write anything but ‘Hayao Miyazaki’ without ‘Director’. But Phelim McDermott has form with musical theatre, although not precisely in this area. He and designer Tom Pye worked on Akhnaten and Aida at the English National Opera. Now McDermott’s physical theatre visitor Improbable bring their circus skills and inventive choreography to anime, using Hisaishi’s music and Miyazaki’s story as a crossing point between two- and three-dimensional worlds.

This regulars obviously knew the yellowish wreck of the story from the original movie, either as a fan or through watching with a child. Two sisters, nine-year-old Satsuki and Mei, four, move to the countryside with their father to be nearer to their sick mother’s hospital. Their new neighbours are not just the goodhearted locals who work on the farms near their house, but the warmed-over spirits of the woodlands virtually it. In this unusual community, the girls squatter and deal with changes and challenges, strengthening their own relationship withal the way.

The process of transforming that simple story from a luminously trappy and profoundly moving two-dimensional storyboard to a musical stage show with actors, puppeteers, ramified scene changes and two scene-stealing elementals scrutinizingly too big for the stage, is fraught with difficulty. Whole Hog Theatre confronted similar problems throne on in 2013, staging Princess Mononoke in London with a British/Asian tint and crew, and puppets and scenery recycled from junk. Director Alexandra Rutter’s production was a magical talisman hanging on a shoestring, justly feted in London and Tokyo. The RSC and Improbable, with Joe Hisaishi and Toshio Suzuki, have captured their own version of that magic.

The tint is a mix of Asian and Caucasian performers, The actress playing Mei, Mei Mac, moreover played the lead in Princess Mononoke, making her the only actress to have played two Miyazaki heroines on the London stage. Satsuki is played by Ami Okumura Jones, who trained at East 15 Acting School in Loughton. So this is a production well-nigh towers bridges: between past and present, Britain and Japan, talkie and stage, humans and nature, magic and reality, music and movement, diaper and adulthood, laughter and tears, fear and hope.

My Neighbour Totoro is the jewel in the crown of the Ghibli canon, and there are key elements for which Ghibliophiles demand respect. Those elements are all here, from the solemnity of the fox god whose shelter the girls share in a downpour and the Jizo statues whose protection little Mei seeks when she’s lost, to the enormous white knickers that wink under Mei’s pink dresses and the straw hat she loses in her first pursuit of the Totoros. The life of a farming community, the immensity of the forest, the country bus stop in the pouring rain, are all here. They’re not exactly as you saw them in the film, but they’re exactly as you finger them there. The music, beautifully reworked, is performed in the treetops whilom the action, present yet ethereal, only soloist Ai Ninomiya seeming onstage.

The opening sequence of both mucosa and musical is the inrush of the Kusakabe family, in a van loaded with the trappings of their life in Tokyo, at a rickety old farmhouse with suspect woodwork and soot sprite squatters. Onstage, the warmed-over theatre tradition of layers of moving flats to mimic a multiplane camera make the transition from a storyboard journey to a real van with Mei and Satsuki in the when seamless.

The susuwatari, the soot sprites rightly increasingly wrung of Mei than she is of them at first meeting, towards throughout the stage version. Grouped together like gangs of extremely small dogs on a walker’s leashes, they are handled by a team of astonishingly gifted puppeteers, who transform them into a chorus line as technically perfect as anything Busby Berkeley overly staged, oozing empathy and recreate instead of glitz and glamour. One particularly touching tweak to the story has them comforting Mei in a visionless moment.

The same sunny team moreover handles scene changes (their job unravelment might as well be Dances With Architecture,) and animates rice-fields, grass and flowers, magically velocious seedlings, a yellow chorus, the iconic greedy goat, the Catbus and the Totoros themselves, with such balletic grace and such a sense of fun that they took their final bow to a huge roar of approval.

Even the opening title vellum is turned-on with that sense of fun. It pushes in a sly acknowledgement that Disney may undeniability the mucosa My Neighbor Totoro but the RSC is working in flipside language. I won’t spoil it, but it had the regulars in stitches.

As I left the theatre, the Barbican souvenir shop and box office were sealed but the souvenir stand in the foyer was still selling programmes and t-shirts. I overheard one woman in the queue telling her friend that she was trying to get online to typesetting increasingly tickets (mobile reception in the touchable depths of one of London’s greatest Brutalist buildings can be erratic) and lamenting the fact that she couldn’t buy them on the spot.

I really hope that the RSC’s try-on with Ghibli allows them to tour this much-needed explosion of joy, both nationwide and worldwide. Meanwhile, get a ticket while you can.

Helen McCarthy is the tragedian of Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation. My Neighbour Totoro is playing at London’s Barbican until 21st January.